£81.50
Bourboulenc-led and named after the sea wind that salts the grapes - a white wine from AOC La Clape on the Languedoc coast.
Pear and something like sweet pastry on the nose, honeysuckle behind it, all of it fresher and louder than the price would lead you to expect. Bright golden yellow with a green cast. The attack is smooth and cool, then apricot in syrup and a twist of star anise fill out the middle, and the finish turns properly savoury - iodine, sea air, a salty citrus tang that hangs around. Four months on the fine lees gives it the texture. At this money you would expect solid; instead you get textured and layered. Superb value.
Top food pairings:
"Le Marin is the wind. It's the warm, humid southerly that comes off the Gulf of Lion, sometimes at over 160km an hour, and it's the one that carries salt onto the grapes. So when you taste that salty tang on the finish and wonder where it came from - that's it. It's the wind, in the glass."
Sarrat de Goundy farm in AOC La Clape, on a limestone massif that was a genuine island until the Middle Ages - the Phoenicians called it Lykia, the Romans Insula Laci, and silt from the Aude eventually closed the channel. Some sources still described it as an island in 1688. Olivier Calix is the third generation there, working 3,000 hours of sunshine and under 600mm of rain a year, on rock so permeable it holds no surface water at all.
The clearest value argument in the range. An AOC La Clape white wine, made with indigenous yeast and four months on lees, from an appellation of only 778 hectares.
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